As the new school year begins, it is time to acknowledge that as a country, the United States has let women down — once again. By failing to contain the coronavirus and then failing to develop any plan for schools or child care that would allow adults to work full time, federal policy is on track to push many parents (predominantly women) out of or away from the workforce in droves.
But the pandemic is not creating a new problem; it’s exacerbating an old one. Even before March, parents, especially women, were making significant career sacrifices because of the United States’ historic failure to create an adequate child-care infrastructure. Studies have shown that women who took five years out of the workforce to care for children saw a 19 percent decrease in lifetime earnings. A full quarter of women who took time off to care for children reported negative effects on their career.
Since the 1970s, feminists have advocated for better paid leave and child-care policies to mitigate these effects. But in the 1970s, they also pushed for legislation that would provide resources to help women move between caregiving in the home and the workforce. This frequently forgotten feminist campaign offers a path forward for the women whom public policies have failed during this pandemic.
Among second-wave feminists, no one more clearly articulated the need to help women reenter the workforce than Tish Sommers. In the 1970s, Sommers was newly divorced and in her late 50s. Along with many women in a similar position, Sommers began to try to reenter the workforce after years at home raising children (and, in Sommers’s case, years of left-wing activism). Employers, skeptical of the gaps in these women’s résumés, did not roll out the welcome mat.
In 1975, Sommers coined the term “displaced homemaker” to describe women like her who had lost the income that allowed them to care for their families in the home through divorce, widowhood or loss of welfare benefits but could not find a new job. Sommers liked that the term “displaced homemaker” captured a useful “analogy between displaced persons ‘forcibly exiled’ through social upheaval or war and a whole generation of women caught in the 1970s, ‘forcibly exiled,’ displaced from a role, an occupation, dependency status, and a livelihood.”
Sommers and her allies worked on the federal and state levels to pass legislation creating displaced homemaker centers that offered job training, counseling and placement services. The first bill was introduced in California in 1975. It quickly inspired the introduction of similar legislation in 27 other states as well as national legislation sponsored by California’s first Black congresswoman, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke.
Burke understood displaced homemaker legislation as coextensive with a broader commitment to full employment legislation — a proposal that would have required making the goal of full employment (usually defined as 3 percent unemployment) the focus of federal fiscal, monetary and social policy. In the 1970s, full employment legislation before Congress promised public sector jobs to anyone seeking work and unable to find employment in the private sector (much like today’s calls for a federal jobs guarantee). Burke believed this legislation — which in its specifics prioritized jobs for men — needed to be accompanied by a host of programs designed to specifically improve women’s employment opportunities, including displaced homemaker legislation.
Displaced homemaker legislation passed as part of a broader workforce development package, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, in 1978. By the mid-1980s, there were over 1,000 displaced homemaker centers across the country. Displaced homemaker centers generally offered job placement and counseling services. They helped women connect to training and education programs as well as other social services. These programs only began to scratch the surface of the economic problems created by women’s disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work, but they planted an important flag for federal policy.
Because of Sommers and Burke, the federal government acknowledged it had a responsibility to women whose care work had kept them out of the paid workforce. To this day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks displaced homemakers as a specific category of dislocated worker.
Feminists in the 1970s were much less successful at winning paid leave policies and child care. Despite extensive lobbying, policymakers were unwilling to create costly new entitlement programs that recognized the value of women’s work in the home. Remarkably, however, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act made significant strides in this direction. By extending unemployment insurance benefits (including the $600 Pandemic Unemployment Compensation) to adults who had to leave their job to care for children whose schools closed, the Cares Act provided important — and historically unique — recognition of the economic value of care work. Unfortunately, the Cares Act benefits have lapsed.
The coronavirus is not going to create a new generation of displaced homemakers, but the analogy is once again useful. We are in a moment of social and economic upheaval. Women are likely to be doubly displaced — first from the jobs they held before the pandemic and then, when the pandemic ends, from the caregiving roles they have been forced into. A successful and equitable pandemic recovery requires reviving Sommers’s idea that we need a federal workforce development system that explicitly helps women reenter the workforce after periods of caregiving in the home.
Ultimately, Sommers and her allies understood that a feminist agenda required active policy interventions that corrected for past and ongoing inequities. The pandemic and our government’s response thus far are, together, creating and deepening inequality every day. We need to start imagining an agenda that can rectify this failure for women when the immediate crisis is over.